


Monsters (it's only us)

by sebviathan



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, M/M, Psychoanalysis, Psychopaths In Love, direct allusions to lord of the flies aka my favorite book
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-04-25
Packaged: 2018-01-20 19:26:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1522796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sebviathan/pseuds/sebviathan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Man is, at its purest core, a beast. Which makes Sam Winchester the purest man in the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monsters (it's only us)

When Sam kills, he becomes a beast. Teeth bared, hair like that of a spooked cat, claws extended, and eyes glazed over so that they are almost the yellow that would signify madness.

He kills the way a rottweiler kills a smaller dog. It's not about ending a life for him—that's just what it always comes down to. Violence is what it is. Pure violence, not at all held back or reserved like he's always forced himself to be in every other aspect of life. There is no calculation or grace, no notion of planning or making room for consequence. Complex thoughts don't enter his mind.

He supposes he must always be a beast, though, since he doesn't necessarily take on a mental change when he's about to kill. He doesn't go from Jekyll to Hyde. If anything, in fact, it's in reverse order. Sam's natural state is anger, such immense anger that the average person would figure it must take massive amounts of energy to be that way even over the absolute worst thing (when it actually takes energy for him to  _not_  be angry). It doesn't show on his face because he has been this way since birth and therefore knows how to control it.

Relatively recently he has gotten absolutely _tired_  of controlling it. It's no different than someone almost never shedding a single tear for nearly twenty years—they need to cry at  _some_  point. Killing people is the healthiest thing for him, believe it or not. It's something to relieve all that rage inside of him, to take the anger (at nothing in particular and he doesn't know why it's there because it's just  _always_  been there) he's been holding back and rip it out of himself. It's thrashing arms as he beats the shit out of some poor accountant and the pavement hitting his knuckles and making them bleed, his own knife slashing jaggedly through the man's chest and making  _him_  bleed, screams hitting the walls and adrenaline filling Sam's bloodstream with every deep breath he takes.

It's the blood that really gets him going and that's where he  _really_  thinks he becomes a beast because he sees red and he smiles on instinct; he wants to consume it. The more of it that he gets on himself the better the kill is, the more ingrained in his animal instincts he has become. That's possibly the most satisfying part of it.

Sam thinks that that's one of the reason he needs it so much. The blood. The animal part of him-the  _beast_. He felt uncomfortable reading  _Lord of the Flies_  in high school and he never wanted to believe that all humans are truly monsters, but now he's sure that the reason he didn't like the book was because he saw himself back then. He  _was_  Jack, the evil and the violence, and he didn't want to be that at the time. He didn't want to think of himself as a monster.

That was really only because it never crossed his mind that  _monster_  could have anything but a bad connotation. Now Sam figures differently: If all humans are inherently monsters, doesn't that mean that the traditional idea of  _humanity_  is a relatively new social construct? Doesn't that mean that people who abide by goodness and adhere to social norms of politeness and "common decency" have gone away from their roots? And isn't leaving your roots behind a  _bad thing_?

Alright, it's Lucifer who got that idea into his head, he'll admit that. But all it ever took was the mention and then Sam was drilling it further and further by himself. That's how it always was and still is with Lucifer—he's something you just can't help but drift toward, like a drug except you want to please  _him_  the same way he pleases you. His ideas feel like your ideas and he seems like the best thing you could ever have and you're just  _waiting_  for the "but," but there isn't one. There aren't any conditions. He's everything you've ever wanted and you're the same to him.

Lucifer always said that when you kill, it shows the real you. It shows what you're like at your core, at your purest instinct. And if someone has the conviction to kill in the first place, they're already mostly pure. Otherwise they're clouded by the social construct of "humanity" and what others tell them what to do and what to believe, or at the very least they're  _weak_.

But  _Sam_ _—_ Lucifer would tell him—is the purest among men, for he is held back by absolutely nothing, and all he sees when Sam kills is pleasure and relief. His body thrums with it, and he can feel it and everyone can see it.

He's not just a beast. He is  _the_  beast.

He doesn't quite think of himself so highly, but he loves that Lucifer sees the real him and doesn't run away. Lucifer saw his anger the moment they met and instead of fearing it, he gave Sam a way to fix it. Instead of trying to kill the monster, he embraced it. He nurtured it. He made love to it.

Now Sam's life is blood, adrenaline, and Lucifer. And he is infinitely happy that he met Lucifer because otherwise his life at this point might be a literal void as opposed to a metaphorical one—nothing, that is to say. Before Lucifer he always imagined endgame as a bullet in his brain pretty soon down the line. Now he knows that if a bullet ends up anywhere in his head there'll be one in Lucifer's to match, and neither will be his own.

He still spends a lot of time, after the couple years they've been together now, wondering if Lucifer is a monster. Lucifer embraces his animal instinct and acts upon it whenever possible, and he too, like Sam, is almost constantly angry. He needs blood in his life and most of all he rejects society entirely and refuses to be a part of it.

He's a monster in the sense of his  _Lord of the Flies_  ideology and for the reasoning he so often encourages Sam to be one, but Sam does not see some darkened, clawed thing inside of Lucifer. What he sees is something far from dark—almost literally a white light or at least something divine, which of course doesn't make him any less dangerous because angels are the fiercest of warriors that mankind cannot bear to see.

Lucifer is an angel of death and compacted, yet celestial destruction. Lucifer is the personification of free will because he seems to be the only person on this godforsaken planet who truly understands it. Lucifer is danger in itself, so sharp and beautiful that it would be an honor to be killed by him (if it were to ever come down to that, and Sam tries not to hope for it).

For the way he kills is too graceful to be monstrous, too much like a dance. Sam watches Lucifer kill and he sees it like a Waltz, and he wants to step in and take his hands and finish the dance with him. He wishes, sometimes, that his own kills were like that instead of the violent messes he makes.

And sometimes he stands alongside Lucifer instead of just watching and gets to live out that wish for a night. Sometimes Lucifer helps him, too, and is able to be in the state of the  _beast_  which he so reveres in Sam.

It's not that Lucifer doesn't need the violence, or that he doesn't like it. His kills can be perfectly violent when he needs them to be, in fact, but he somehow still keeps his blows so precise that it's an art form.

That's what it is. An art form. That's  _why_. All his life he's hated the world, and this is how he shapes it into something beautiful. Quite the opposite of Sam, most of the rest of his life he's been unrestrained and badly behaved and impulsive—because that was the only way he could ever keep himself from going positively insane. The little things were able to compartmentalize his anger and urge to kill for a while, until that urge got bigger. So his behavior got worse until he could finally leave home and decide his own fate and his own consequences.

Once again the opposite of Sam, he's never been in control before, and killing is the only way that he can be. Lucifer feels like a  _God_  when he kills, all sharp, yet fluid motions, smooth breathing and his neck aligned with his back when he can help it. He makes his kills divine and he plans out his  _designs_  in his head like rough sketches that he subsequently fills with blood and screams and then deafening silence. It all ends up just as satisfying as Sam's style of violence.

After each kill, they both seem to come out as cleaner men. Not in the literal sense, of course, as they allow so much blood to get on their hands (and their clothes, and their faces) and never fail to end up smelling of sweat and come because even men such as them can't avoid dirtying themselves up when getting off on a kill (clothes still on, more blood on their faces). But they're cleaner in the sense that they feel washed of something, and like they've gained something as well.

Every time one of them has a brief existential crisis and wonders if any of this is right or if they've literally been delusional this entire time, that  _washed_  feeling reminds them of why they do this: Clearly, they were meant to.

" _Clearly, we were meant to_ ," often echoes in Sam's head in Lucifer's voice, and vice versa, because they've both said it and promptly justified it in terms of fate versus free will. ( _It's not what someone else decided for me to do, but what I truly want to do deep inside, what I was made for._ )

(Neither of them know whether they believe that there's even a God who would have made them for anything in the first place.)

The anger goes away, at least. But only temporarily, as it's a temporary cure just as any medication is—two pills in the morning, two at night. Except it's more like  _a murder or so every other week, kill more if necessary_. Those are the instructions they've given themselves, and it's much easier to swallow than the pills (antipsychotics) either of them used to take before they met.

These are truly the men they were always supposed to be, and they both figure, now, that they've always known it. They're closer to home than home ever was with each other.

Sam still sometimes wishes, though, that he wouldn't have to be quite so violent, and that he could instead make proper  _art_  like Lucifer.

And Lucifer can't help but wish that he could topple civilizations rather than just slowly burn them down. He so often wishes that he could be more like Sam, the  _Beast_.

**Author's Note:**

> “Maybe," he said hesitantly, "maybe there is a beast. What I mean is, maybe it's only us.”   
> \-- Simon, Lord of the Flies


End file.
